Q&A 30: Down by the old mainstream
Claire Hogg asks:
"Your music taste fascinates me. Is there anything you'd consider 'mainstream' that you also enjoy listening to?"
I like this question because it opens up a wider question: what is the "mainstream" in 2025? Music is consumed so differently now to how it was in the late Eighties, when my deep interest in it began, that it's almost impossible to equate the two things. I recently read that as much music is released to market in a DAY now as was released in the whole of 1989. Given that profound explosion, it is almost impossible to unify a monoculture around an artist. Arguably, there is no monoculture in music any more. The few truly monolithic artists of today are both holdovers from the very last days pre-streaming and omnipresent artist-as-brand. For comparison, Hootie & The Blowfish or Alanis Morrissette were sales juggernauts in my teenage years, huge money-spinners, but were (and remain) almost completely mysterious to me as people.
So what would be a mainstream artist in 2025? One of the touring behemoths like Taylor Swift or Coldplay? Or even the reactivated Oasis? Each of these artists serves a different function, be it girlboss soap opera, proxy for an interest in music, or ersatz sports-crowd singalong. Emergent figures like Chappell Roan (someone who clearly does not wish to be an artist-as-brand, but has been adopted as such) or Olivia Rodrigo don't present a point of buy-in for me. No matter how competent they might be (and they are!), I don't care. And once we get on to the thick-necked man-warblers who clog the upper reaches of the singles charts, I despair. I'm not Morgan Wallen's target audience. Morgan is not for me. I don't think he should be for anybody. I'm too old for hip hop, I can enjoy the ceaseless lyrical skill and the invention, and sometimes I will spend an hour watching videos and investigating "what goes on" just to learn the names (partly because I think it is funny to hear myself say them), but it wears me out quite quickly.
We have to add to this that streaming, the way most music is now consumed, has changed how a lot of music is written. Some of the melody and dynamics have disappeared from mainstream music, there's a smoothing out of the sort of stand-outs that characterised what I grew up with and enjoyed. That's not to say that they've disappeared from ALL music, but with 365x as much being released as when I first went to the record shop, it becomes necessary for me, as a deep listener, to go outside the mainstream. A purely statistical necessity!
I'm nearly fifty. I think a lot of people have ceased to really pay attention to new music by the time they're 30. That might be a late estimate, even. Teens drive the mainstream. And even as a kid, the things I liked didn't often intersect with what my friends were listening to. I had eclectic tastes. There was a period from roughly 1999-2010 where it felt like my side had won, and the eclecticism and things I had bought into, both old and new, felt like currency. They had put fools like me in charge for a time. But the tide went out again, and pretty soon I was back on the beach with my metal detector. Which is probably where you find me today. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying a song by a mass market act, but I'm not always aware that that is what they are. To me they're just another coin I somehow dug out of the sand.
Comments (9)
I find the assessment of Coldplay as "proxy for an interest in music" very funny. Bravo.
A plug for the Wave Pictures. They've being going a long time (20 years) but are fiercely independent and always play small (sometimes tiny) venues for an intimate experience. And they're good.
I miss Dr Ladysounds!
I find it interesting that there are almost no more pop groups. Every new artist is a singer like Taylor Swift, or Ed Sheeran, or any of a number of fabricated talents. Our youth had lots of bands like the Kinks, Oasis, The Beatles, Nirvana, Muse. When's the last time someone similar entered the pop charts, outside of K-Pop?
Well, k-pop groups are "groups" though obviously not in the rock setup sense. But rock is kind of a played out genre as a cultural force. Kids still get into it - witness all the teenagers at the Oasis reunion shows - but streaming gives you access to the canon and if you're 13 it doesn't matter how old something is if you like it. Reliance on purchasing physical media drew a line between back catalogue and new releases - even a financial one. A back catalogue CD cost £5 more than a new release when I was 15. Novelty was subsidised. Go see King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and you'll see contemporary "alternative" rock that is popular, with a strong and loyal following capable of filling big venues, but it's not chart music. There's no intersection with pop culture. It's closer to Hawkwind or 70s prog than Oasis in terms of reach. And even a lot of the things we think of as popular "bands" from the last twenty years, aren't -- Tame Impala, Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend. They're one-man shows dressed up in band clothes. I thought of Haim but their last top 40 single in the UK was in 2014. It's important not to conflate the charts as we remember them with the charts of our youth though - apples and oranges. Streaming has broken the way both singles and album charts work.
My first Favorite Song was "Joy to the World" by my first Favorite Artist Three Dog Night. In the days of the 8-track player, I got, like 5 or 6 albums of theirs and I would listen through them. Then, in the early/mid 70's, Elton John and *Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player* and *Goodbye Yellow Brick Road*. Next came Fleetwood Mac (especially Christine McVie) and the white *Fleetwood Mac* album had me following that band (and filling in on their back catalog) for a couple years. Why only a couple? Because Kate Bush and *The Kick Inside* came out, an album I listened to just about every day for the summer of 79. I was a Shrub until the 90's, when Tori Amos ascended to the throne. She still sits there, but Richard Thompson is nearby, and CHVRCHES are coming in hot 'n' heavy.
And I am enthralled by Chappell Roan! And Florence + the Machine, Bat For Lashes, Silversun Pickups, MUNA... etc. etc.
10 years ahead of you and know your feeling on trying to pay attention but not clicking. Though I occasionally click with something new, I’m more just bored or mystified (Coldplay is still a thing? Didn’t they bore their audience to death with Yellow way back when?). I was checking into a hotel to do an artist alley and the crowd was definitely NOT the con… a woman told me they were there for Morgan Wallen. I just assumed it was an insurance company meeting and was astounded to read about the lump of thud that they had all traveled to see when I figured it out. I now wish Morgan Wallen was an insurance company… a soulless corporation would be better for the world than that guy.
I got my start as a serious music consumer in the late 70s, and the landscape now would be completely unrecognizable to thirteen year old me. In the early 80s I was mainstream; from the late 80s through the 90s I was into "college radio", with a notable penchant for grunge. By the early 2000s I found myself washed up on John's proverbial beach, in my late 30s with a widening hole in my life where "new music" had been. And then (really working the metaphor here), my metal detector led me to the world of extreme metal. For the last fifteen years I've been vigorously buying album downloads from weird Death Metal and Black Metal bands that nobody I know personally have ever heard of. It's strange being so far outside of the world of popular music.